Overview
- Contributes to Beckett studies, modernist studies, and reception studies
- Investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes
- Analyzes the debates about modes of reception in modernist writers by interwar critics
Part of the book series: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century (NIBTFC)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.
Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars.
For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Nick Wolterman is an independent scholar based in York, UK. He received his PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism
Authors: Nick Wolterman
Series Title: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05650-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-05649-9Published: 21 July 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-05652-9Published: 22 July 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-05650-5Published: 20 July 2022
Series ISSN: 2945-6797
Series E-ISSN: 2945-6800
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 204
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Fiction, British and Irish Literature, Drama, Contemporary Theatre